Managing Ability Costs in a Post-Morrowind World

As per the currently proposed updates to the game in the Morrowind chapter (arriving 6th of June, 2017), players are going to find themselves running on empty when it comes to resources. Sustainability has been… streamlined… to put it nicely in an effort to bring the game back into line with the developer’s original intentions.

The Brief Rant

This is a small rant about the patch notes and the reasons for the sustain changes – feel free to skip over it.

Zenimax has made it clear. We’ve had it too easy for too long. Sustaining resources has been far too easy in well organised raids, letting us optimise our DPS builds for pure damage. All of the best damage dealers in the game would have their jewellery enchanted with weapon/spell damage, and with Major and Minor Sorcery/Brutality up 100% of the time, we were getting around 652 free damage without losing out on our sustainability. Because there are no ability cooldowns in the game, the “rotation” was born, an order of skill executions that maximised the strength of our setups. With healers and tanks providing as much utility as possible for damage dealers in trials, we were free to execute our rotations without running into sustain issues and therefore our scores depended on how well we managed the mechanics and our rotations at the same time. Now, Zenimax has announced that they are bringing the game back to a balance between damage and sustain that they are happy with. And what an uproar there has thus far been.

If you have not already read the patch notes for the Morrowind update in their entirety, I do think it is worth a read, to understand and spot the trend. While I do believe that this is the right direction to take the game, it may simply be too much at once and it may also be the wrong way to go about it. Come update time, it is going to be impossible to tell which of the changes implemented are working and which aren’t, because all data we have before the Morrowind patch will be rendered useless. It’s going to be like comparing apples with oranges, and some of the changes on their own aren’t even that clever. Imposing penalties to maxing resource pools and removing or nerfing class defining skills and skill lines aren’t in the best interests of the game. What Zenimax is trying to do is shift the meta away from Templar healers and away from Dragonknight tanks, and whilst diversity is good and I agree with this, why weaken skill lines virtually dedicated to these roles? The answer is possibly that they want to give leverage to the Warden class to help it flourish in an already well-established format, but at what cost? About 18.6% apparently.

The Outlook

Before I delve into the before and after shots, I’m going to quickly summarise what the proposed changes are that directly or indirectly affect your ability costs and your sustain. Again, I recommend reading the patch notes for context but here are the current plans and how they affect each role.

Stamina vs Magicka

• Reduced the cooldown for being charged Stamina or Magicka to block an attack to 0.25 seconds from 0.5 seconds.
• Stamina abilities are now universally 15% cheaper than their Magicka counterparts, originally being 20% cheaper.
• Minor Magickasteal: Reduced the amount of Magicka this debuff restores to the attacker to 300 Magicka from 400 Magicka.

Dragonknight

• Inferno: Reduced the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 33%.
• Lava Whip: Reduced the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 10%.
• Battle Roar: This passive ability now restores an equal amount of Health, Magicka, and Stamina when you use an Ultimate ability, and the amounts are now based on your character level instead of your Max Resource(s).
• Helping Hands: This passive ability now restores Stamina based on your character level instead of your Max Stamina.

Templar

• Spear Shards: The synergy from this ability and its morphs now restore Stamina or Magicka, whichever percentage is lower. The amount restored is now based on your character level instead of your Max Resource. The synergy also has a shared cooldown with the Necrotic Orb synergy.
• Luminous Shards: This morph now causes the synergy to also restore an equal amount of Magicka or Stamina to the casting Templar, with a 20-second cooldown.
• Repentance: This morph now restores Health and Stamina based on your character level instead of your Max Resource. It also only restores Stamina to the casting Templar, but continues to restore Health to the casting Templar and his allies.

Nightblade

• Leeching Strikes: This morph now converts the ability into a Stamina ability and causes your Light and Heavy Attacks to restore Stamina based on your character level.
• Siphoning Attacks: This morph now causes your Light and Heavy Attacks to also restore Magicka based on your character level.

Weapon Skills

• Reverse Slash (Two-Handed): Reduced the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 27%. Two-Handed doesn’t see much use in PvE.
• Twin Slashes (Dual Wield): Increased the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 60%.
• Volley (Bow): Increased the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 30%.

Light Armor

• Evocation: This is now a 2-point passive, originally 3-points. It now reduces the cost of your Magicka abilities by 1/2% per piece of Light Armor, down from 1/2/3%.
• Recovery: This is now a 3-point passive, originally 2-points. It now increases your Magicka Recovery by 2/3/4% per piece of Light Armor, instead of 2/4%.

Medium Armor

• Wind Walker: This passive ability now reduces the cost of your Stamina abilities by 1/2% per piece of Medium Armor, down from 2/3%.

Heavy Armor

• Constitution: Reduced the Magicka and Stamina restored by this passive ability by approximately 42%.

Alliance War Skills

• Vigor (Alliance War): Increased the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 30%.

Racial Skills

• Resourceful (Argonian): This passive ability now restores Health, Magicka, and Stamina based on your character level instead of your Max Resource.
• Adrenaline Rush (Redguard): This passive ability now restores Stamina based on your character level instead of your Max Stamina.

Champion Points

• Warlord and Magician cost reductions no longer exist and Arcanist and Mooncalf have had their values reduced and frontloaded.

Item Sets

• Worm’s Raiment: Decreased the Magicka ability cost reduction granted by this item set to 4% from 5%.

Regarding Tanking

Depending specifically on the fight, the halving of the cooldown for being charged resources for blocking will either not affect you at all or have a substantial effect. You should see no difference in fights with few enemies, such as boss fights. Fights with numerous ads such as any trash pull in the game, or the Mage’s axes in Veteran Aetherian Archive, could prove to be the kinds of fights that separate the boys from the men. Changes to universal Stamina costs, Helping Hands, Champion Points, Heavy Armor and Minor Magickasteal will also have a large effect altogether. Shards/Orbs will also be more dubious, and the shared cooldown is an indirect nerf to Alkosh. For tanks only, Battle Roar just got buffed slightly, but that won’t claw back a fraction of what you’re now missing. And finally, if you were either an Argonian or Redguard tank, you’re missing a few resources now. It’s unknown yet how much.

Regarding Off-Tanking

With specific focus on medium armor builds, the Vigor spamming strategies will lose a lot of viability when it comes to changes to Vigor, Champion Points, Medium Armor and both Earthen Heart passives.

Regarding Healing

You may not want to run Shards anymore on your Templar, although the Shards synergy is many times easier to pick up. Orb synergies are easily missed. Repentance is completely dead, end of story. Healers boast supreme magicka recovery but will still feel the effects of a loss of cost reductions from Champion Points and Light Armor, and will could run out of magicka in long stressful fights.

Regarding Magicka DPS

Dragonknights got a small buff to their whips and inferno, but will overall pay the price with less resources recovered from Battle Roar and all other non-class related changes. Regarding class changes, Sorcerers remain practically unchanged, as do Templars (excluding healers). I’m predicting that the Nightblade’s Siphoning Attacks will be at least 75% weaker in the coming patch, it’s hard to tell. They may yet become one of the best DPS classes to run in an era where sustain is key.

Regarding Stamina DPS

Zenimax doesn’t believe that the hole for your grave is deep enough, so they just keep digging. If you are still building a trials-worthy stamina DPS, read [this]. However, to those that power on, please enjoy an increase to costs for all stamina skills by about 5%, and to add ti their woes, a strong increase to Rending Slashes and Endless Hail, skills that just about every stamina DPS uses. You guys are the worst affected, suffering a nerf from more than half of the above listed changes.

The Maths

Let’s pretend we have three skills at our disposal.

No Reductions
Skill 1 - 1500
Skill 2 - 2500
Skill 3 - 3500

This is 100% of the cost. In the Morrowind patch, your Heavy Armor is basically going to operate at these full ability costs.

In the Homestead patch, you could have -16% cost reductions with 100 Champion Points in Warlord/Magician.

CP Reductions
Skill 1 - 1260
Skill 2 - 2100
Skill 3 - 2940

That would then stack diminishingly with light or medium armor. Let’s just say we’re using 5 pieces of light armor for now.

CP + Light Reductions
Skill 1 - 1071
Skill 2 - 1785
Skill 3 - 2499

So this works out to be a ~28.6% reduction of the original cost, rather than an additive 31% reduction. This of course won’t matter next patch as all CP reductions will be removed and light and medium armor will drop from 3% per piece to 2% per piece, meaning a traditional 5/1/1 build is going to yield a 10% reduction to all costs.

Post-Morrowind Reductions
Skill 1 - 1350
Skill 2 - 2250
Skill 3 - 3150

As you can see each skill is going to cost a LOT more than pre-patch. And the recovery CP is being reduced and frontloaded heavily.

The Trade-Off

If you want to sustain, you’re going to have to change your build and rotation and one of the easiest but possibly most detrimental ways is to invest in Cost Reduction Glyphs on your jewellery. Each gold glyph before other reductions gives a raw 203 cost reduction to each skill, and this can stack additively, but you’re going to lose approximately 217 buffed spell or weapon damage with each glyph. Furthermore, these glyphs give a diminished return in conjunction with some other reduction systems, including light armor. With a 5/1/1 build, the glyph will reduce your spell or feat costs by approximately 183.

This trade-off is also going to greatly affect cheaper abilities, whilst having a lesser effect on expensive skills. Here is a comparison using Skill 2, our moderate cost skill.

Skill 2 cost
2500 - No reductions
1785 - Typical Homestead build

2250 - Typical Morrowind build
2067 - Add 1 CR glyph  (-174 raw dmg)
1884 - Add 2 CR glyphs (-348 raw dmg)
1700 - Add 3 CR glyphs (-522 raw dmg)

So if we want to continue doing our old rotations, we’re going to have to sacrifice our entire collection of spell or weapon damage glyphs from our jewellery, and even this may not be enough to completely overturn the entirety of resource reworks from this patch.

Other Theories

Deep down, I know you don’t want to give up your spell damage so here are a list of other potential strategies that have come to mind.

7/0/0 Builds

This will be something that Magicka builds will be able to utilise more, as a lot of Stamina DPS run 7 medium already. The extra 4% spell cost reduction and 8% Magicka recovery will help a little bit with sustain, and with the game removing some rewards for having a stacked resource pool, this could be seen as a worthwhile move. You will lose your undaunted bonuses to afford it however.

Heavy Attacks and DoTs

The Sorcerer Pet build can already make use of this, and I do sense that their strength is only going to increase in the coming patch. There is a rotation that can utilise a heavy attack and pull close to 40k DPS without most raid buffs. Of course, the next issue is dealing with the pet, but the hassle might be worth it for the more sustainable DPS. Other classes may be able to find a rotation involving a heavy attack that works for them.

Sorcerers using Dark Exchange

An unused skill in raids for the most part in previous patches, due to the limitations on the number of skills sorcerers were able to bar, and the sustain provided through group utility. This skill will likely see a LOT of use, possibly in place of Endless Fury/Mage’s Wrath. The bonus here is that it provides a ton of resources back and then if the player actives an Orb/Shards synergy, the pool they were converting from is going to get a strong replenish. It could cause problems in fights where blocking or dodge rolling plays a roll, such as the first boss in Veteran Sanctum Ophidia.

Sustain Sets in Builds

A 5-piece Moondancer set is elusive, especially on Staff-based builds, but it may allow the user to take advantage of the recovery that the set can provide. We may see Lich sets being used on DPS characters. It’s a big DPS hit to have to bar a set like this, however it may allow the user to run spell power glyphs on their jewellery. I however doubt either of these is going to be strong enough to off-set all of the recovery changes.

Equilibrium

Everyone’s favourite skill for giving the healer a heart attack. Using this skill is risky in a lot of situations and doesn’t return a huge amount of magicka, but it just might work. Using it also empowers your direct damage abilities and if morphed correctly, reduces the cost of your next ability by 25%. It definitely looks good on paper, but could cause your untimely demise.

Further Viewing

Absolutely compulsory viewing for a full understanding and demonstration on a lot of things related to resources this patch.